Glass WallsAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

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This means that we experience emotional arousal even before we identify the
object before us. If the goings-on in the glass-walled slaughterhouse were
the first thing we perceived, the emotional outrage would undoubtedly quench
appetite for flesh in most normal people--at least for a time. But when it's
the well-cut and cellophane-wrapped steak that we see on the meat counter,
emotional charges associated with it from the past are activated first.

The message then is: know the truth with both your heart and your head.
Knowing and living the truth finally makes one free.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian
- Paul McCartney

This well-known line from one of the Beatles says it all. But these
hellholes don't have transparency--just the opposite is true, and for very
good reasons, as summarized by another common saying, "Out of sight, out of
mind." Many people in Western culture now have some idea, somewhere in their
consciousness, of what goes on in our horrific factory farms and
slaughterhells. Some folk are apologetic now and then about still eating
meat. But most manage to put the bad stuff out of their minds when they buy
the neatly wrapped piece of meat in the supermarket, and when they eat the
cooked and salted contents. What are some of the ways this happens? Here
are a few suggestions.

According to neuroscientists, we do not in fact see in a dispassionate
way precisely what is before us; emotion is an integral part of the
experience. When messages travel from our eyes via the optic nerves to our
brain, they do not go directly to the occipital cortex which is the primary
area for processing visual information. They first go to the thalamus, part
of the limbic system, which is involved in emotional arousal. This means
that we experience emotional arousal even before we identify the object
before us. If the goings-on in the glass-walled slaughterhouse were the
first thing we perceived, the emotional outrage would undoubtedly quench
appetite for flesh in most normal people--at least for a time. But when it's
the well-cut and cellophane-wrapped steak that we see on the meat counter,
emotional charges associated with it from the past are activated first.
Steak means tasty, means satisfying, means crucially necessary protein,
means high-end food consumed by the elite. Appetite comes before the
reflection that this is a chunk of the corpse of a once-living animal, and
knowledge of how she or he became this it. (One step in this line of
thinking is almost always skipped altogether: the animal was never anything
but an it.) These familiar positive feelings are usually able to shunt that
uncomfortable information out of consciousness.

If they don’t succeed altogether and the unpleasant feelings do arise a
little, we might, in a society like ours with its very extensive division of
labor, tell ourselves that while we may not like what’s done in
slaughterhouses, that's someone else's job, and he’s decently paid for it.
(We happen to be too busy to check the accuracy of this notion.) I do my
job and others do theirs. No reason I shouldn't use the product of their
labor, as they probably benefit from the fruits of mine.

Or we might tell ourselves that as unpleasant as its source may be, I
need meat for my health; I can't help it. A variant on this idea is the
commonplace reflection that this is just the way the food chain works; life
feeds on life. I didn’t create it, and can’t change it. (We Ellwoods let
ourselves be befuddled by these notions for years.)green-meadow-cows.jpg

The advertising and public relations arms of the meat industry have
usually done their job well enough to head off revolting images of where
meat comes from with amusing cartoon-like drawings, or photos of happy pigs
and contented cows in green fields, even to the point of suggesting that
their negative counterparts are just someone's one-sided propaganda.

The more intellectually sophisticated may think we don't really
understand how animals such as pigs, cows, and chickens experience their
lives. If they’ve never known any life except that in a factory farm, how
can they long for freedom? Do they experience death in a slaughterhouse the
way you or I would? If we don’t know, we shouldn’t make a naive
identification with the animals and get all emotional.

Of course there are other tactics as well. Underlying most of them is a
cultural mindset involving many negative associations with animals which
help to prevent glass-wall thoughts from ever coming to consciousness. They
are all too familiar. Not only are all animals its, the different species
have their own unpleasant qualities. Turkeys and chickens are stupid. Just
look how small their heads are; they’re all birdbrains. Pigs are greedy and
fat and filthy. Cows are bovine, slow-moving as well as stupid; they don’t
feel much if anything. Sheep have no individuality; they all follow the
leader. (No
farm animals have individuality; they’re all identical with others of their
kind, as well as unpleasant.) We needn’t get upset about unpleasant things
being done to these unpleasant creatures [a blame-the-victim tactic].
Besides, that’s what they’re there for anyway.

If you've been reading
Peaceable Table, and other literature dealing
with ethology and the animal concern, you probably know how to reply to
these excuses, all of which would be knocked out for most people by a look
through glass walls. We know very well why the walls are windowless, and why
the management does not offer friendly guided tours to visitors. Instead,
slaughterhells are about as welcoming to curious outsiders as concentration
camps. This is clear from many news stories in recent years, whether they
are exposés of slaughterhell horrors, or tell of attempts by animal
agribusiness lords to promote laws criminalizing covert photography. These
powerful people seem very anxious to hide something, and the legislators
they control with their deep-pocket donations will go along.

It appears that the pictures the industry seems so eager to keep from
getting out include not only people doing appallingly cruel things, but also
sights of the victims’ terrified eyes, their desperate last-minute attempts
to escape, their dreadful screams. It seems clear that whether or not those
warm-blooded beings doomed to die for the benefit our plates think exactly
like humans, their responses are very much as ours would be. As Jeremy
Bentham, one of the first modern philosophers to take animals seriously as
feeling creatures, famously put it, "The question is not, Can they reason?
nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

From a moral, or even a merely human, perspective this is the basic inquiry.
It requires that we “take the view from below,” that we imagine ourselves in
the animals’ place. When we do, the emotions that arise in us are no longer
those of evasion and lies, but those of honest human beings on the way to
becoming whole, to having our deepest feelings in harmony with and our
actions. To do so also puts the matter of our health in perspective. As
animal activists and readers of a host of nutritional studies know by now, a
balanced plant-based diet is much healthier for most, and perhaps for all
people, than one with meat or animal products.

The message then is: know the truth with both your heart and your head.
Knowing and living the truth finally makes one free.

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